JUNE 13TH – 18TH 2010
The words that announce themselves more than any others as such in Donald Theall’s James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics are “machinic” and “ambivalence”, both of which suggest the presence of Duchamp through the associative terms that he used in his own Notes to the Glass and elsewhere – “machine” and “indifference” – Theall had found the association between Joyce and Duchamp as the most courageous artists of the 20th century but had not wished to nail the correspondences that can be shown to exist here with regard particularly to Space-Time. Electro-mechanization increases speed and achieves near simultaneity and instantaneity – the post-electric condition, as Theall argues in the Techno-Poetics connects its untold planes to ambivalence, to chance and serendipity, coincidence and poly-logic but with design and engineering as a theory of the poetic chaosmos, and, as Theall puts it “emphasizing the mystery of the circular nature of reasoning in modernity and its association with recursiveness of ‘strange loops’, which acts on both the self-reflexive nature of society’s knowledge about itself and on aesthetic knowledge about the art of construction - the poetic”.
(Ian Hays. Prelude to the Round Table Discussion on Donald Theall’s James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics – Louis Armand, David Vichnar, Ian Hays, Thomas Jackson Rice). 15th June. 2010.
With much more care and attention to the details of individual letters, and then “words” or portmanteaus, and then associations bleeding from these into sentences and jigsaw chunks of the Wake’s pages, or more usually a half of a single page, Finn Fordham with the aid of some wonderful interjections from his ‘audience’ at this year’s James Joyce Symposium in Prague, opened up various plausible possibilities for Joyce’s thought during the mid-day Lunch-Time Reading Groups on Finnegans Wake. Jim LeBlanc with brilliant aplomb in these Lunch-time digs into Time-Space-writing revealed an outstanding facility for holding onto the scrambled messages being tested and stored amid the drift of voices that proffered guesses at meaning and/or sense that floated into the air above the small flock of would be ‘code breakers’ of the Wake, to bring these together into the kind of complex ‘possibilities’ Joyce was initiating for his ‘new reader’ or ‘new-kind-of-reader’ for his writing. Time after time the Wake revealed itself for a brief moment as a kind of sense-machine to then fold itself back into a scramble of “chiaroscuro coalesce” (FW. 107.29) “Is Finnegans Wake an aesthetic work in any sense of the word?” This was a question I put to Steve McCaffery, whose sparkling words and poetic readings on and around Ulysses/Finnegans Wake insinuated a strong tongedicht and hot Dada approach to sound and tongue-play. In McCaffery’s performances we heard something more than Marjorie Perloff’s survey of McCaffery’s energy in her essay Inner Tension/In Attention: Steve McCaffery’s Book Art (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/mccaf.html)
The materiality of language, Steve McCaffery has suggested in a 1978 essay on the poet bill bissett, is that aspect which remains resistant to an absolute subsumption into the ideality of meaning. To see the letter not as a phoneme but as ink, and to further insist on that materiality, inevitably contests the status of language as a bearer of uncontaminated meaning(s). (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/mccaf.html)
In the manner of Hypermedia Joyce and the work of Louis Armand, David Vichnar and Donald Theall et al, McCaffery has been in the process of ordering a “non-aesthetic” inquest into the sound of the “word” and non-sense opposed to the daily routine of language, yet the aesthetic “term” will not disappear due largely, I would suggest, to the rich detailed blankness that McCaffery’s “songs” intricately deliberate from ink on paper into long draughts of sonic abundance that query no “meaning” but instead draw attention to the human body, especially the ear and mouth: one finds Joyce’s Wake project silvered and split into vivid questionings of noises as to why so many living creatures have larynxes. This Sci-fi technology of voice issuing from the body explodes into visible density through tongue and lip oration and utter concentration a billion miles apart from mere instrument blowing. As McCaffery has noted:
Poetry and science have not always been separate. Lucretius presents his version of particle physics as a poem: De Natura Rerum. Virgil’s Georgics offer a poetic rendition of practical hints on husbandry. Erasmus Darwin’s The Botantical Garden is an amazing attempt to poeticize (with extensive prose footNotes and endNotes) the system of Linnaean classification and the sexual life of plants. I also consider ‘Pataphysics’, the science of imaginary solutions that Alfred Jarry invented at the turn of the 19th century, an important intermediary between poetic creativity and scientific discourse and practice. Deleuze thinks of it as a minor science in relation to the Royal sciences of chemistry, nuclear physics, etc. There are also several current practitioners who are readily incorporating scientific discourse and thinking into their work. In England, Allan Fisher’s poetry explores quantum communication along with such scientific features as decoherence and crowd-out. Christian Bök’s Crystallography is a masterful hybrid of sci-po, and his current project with the genetic implants of poems into primitive life forms (building on the work of Edwardo Kacks) hints at truly exciting collaborative possibilities between poetics and genetic science. Moreover scientific impact is ineluctable: Copernicus on John Donne, Darwin on a whole-range of Victorian writers, cybernetics on Olson. Science is a vital component, in a different way, offering a readily transportable, or “highjackable” body of concepts that poetry can plunder. In my own poetic thinking, I thought the shift from the notion of poetic form to poetic economy opens up wider possibilities to practice and interpretation. Later in Prior to Meaning I adopt the notion of the dissipative structure to discussions of poetry and philosophy, specifically Georges Bataille’s theory of general economy. The former term comes from non-equilibrium thermodynamics. A dissipative structure is a structure that, as it gains complexity, is defined more by what it expends than what it takes in and is usefully applicable to thinking and describing not only poems and literature as a whole, but also the patterns of cities, hemispherical economies and globalization itself.
How curious that Dada inflected-type “sound-poems”, or better, Geräuschgedicht, spray from the poetic mind of an elegant Professor of Poetry and Letters at the University of Buffalo in the 21st century and whose history in the field reveals a body of work that has been and is scrupulously sincere, rare in its overarching achievement and humanly-humorously complex.
Ulysses/Finnegans Wake elucidate physicality in the bodies of their letters: inscriptions, hen scratchings at the “tip”, forging new letters and words as “old” scripted forms are dug from the earth. Exposing the bodies of language in “bits” and “bites” McCaffery’s project as it seems to currently be, feels a lot like speaking-skin, human skin or “foolscap” (FW.185.35) - the largest organ of the body – the skin that Shem in his Dadaist “Filth” (Divine Filth & Georges Bataille perhaps) is prone to write upon in the Wake by means of his own thinned-out excrements and scribed by his own tongue. Thus “Shem was a sham and a low sham” (FW. 170.25) who is crippled by his world but is also the poet, the writer of books, whose mode of endurance is through what Julia Kristeva describes as the “paragram” (and of course all of the other morphing figurative beings-as-letters in the Wake, and as Marjorie Perloff describes in the following way concerning McCaffery):
The paragram "is that aspect of language which escapes all discourse". An analogy to the paragram or what he [McCaffrey] calls the "cipheral text" would be the biotopological form known as the Klein worm - "a form which differs from conventional geometric forms in its characteristic absence of both inner and outer surfaces.... Any part of the form can touch, contact, communicate with, and flow with any other part". The Klein worm provides the model for a form "without 'walls'” with milieu and constellation replacing syntax. The letter - in its major and minor registrations – and of course not the word, forms the basic unit of organization".
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/mccaf.html)
The Wake has been explored as the body that speaks its poetry and/or its sounds as proffered by Kristeva who began an exposure of the letter and the word by means of the poem rather than ‘ordinary language’. If the “new reader” or the “new kind of reader” of Joyceanesque art has acquired the heart for research into the visual arts and more importantly its written and elucidatory component then through such poets as McCaffery they would also discover a way toward the industrial body that has absorbed, but is still absorbing, the linguistic effects of all written freedoms that like music (though geometrically and mathematically formed) enjoy the most infinitesimal changes of timbre, tune, attack, polymorphous interchanges of seemingly meaningless clarity and the history of modern satire, modern recital and of intellectual life.
Temptations toward the thrill of asking “what language is” of seemingly seasoned Joyceans at such meetings and readings is perhaps always a moment away when free-time, so to speak, might allow it. The question of how to become a “Joyce Reader” itself still always hangs in the air around the hoards of speakers who come and go from the panel rooms to the outside world. As Barbara Morrison states in her Assessing James Joyce:
Joyce reiterates the call to “stoop” yet again, when he refers to his writing as a “curio of signs.” In calling attention to the polysemousness of language and to its opacity, Joyce challenges our notions of what it means to be a reader. No longer (in Joyce) are letters and words transparent indicators of meaning. Joyce is working with the opacity of language and the materiality of the medium itself. He calls attention to this positioning of the subject in the text when he describes the reader as “abceminded,” yet, at the same time, as having to see (abceminded) the “claybook” of the text. He commands the reader to stoop to the “allaphbed.” Desire is here – as we stoop to the bed in order to “rede” the lines of force of the world of the body as we encounter our own (seeing/hearing/feeling/thinking/embodied) selves – othered in the text.
http://www.finnegansWake.info/WallLetter/FW4_1Tomb.htm
I had not known there was to be an opening to the exhibition of my ten works with wine and all. Collage (as more than one Joycean hazarded), was the source of my work on Reading Joyce Reading Duchamp, suggesting that people were relating collage to the ten Photoshop images that filled the Philosophy Department room of Charles University near to the entrance of the faculty with the latest series I have produced this year on Shem the Pen of the Wake - pages 169 through 176 with two Blueprints of the work in progress. I have donated these prints on PVA to the faculty itself but have placed emphasis on these works being kept secure by Hypermedia Joyce after they have been hung for more than half a year. But the term “collage” deflects almost everything that this series of works and my entire project as a whole with its essays and its writings on the Internet consists in. When one begins the journey to understand the reasons, the raison d 'être of this project’s status, its unfolding through time, the morphing mechanisms of an open time-field in which the artist-writer-reader-researcher exists as the extrapolator of things not usually thought-through as art, the scene changes from collage to something else and something new. The ‘in-between’ times of re-arrangement that Joyce and Duchamp relied upon in order to create the shattered Gesammtkunstwerk each of them had set in motion from the most simple ingredients became for me the source not so much of rearranging detritus or reshuffling what is already extant, but instead a gestural economy of the Work-in-Progress as the Glass gives up its Infrathin Poetics and the Wake its “polyhedron of scripture” (FW. 107.8) as “ends”, in themselves, to endlessness in action.
Wittgenstein emphasized a similar difference between his mode of philosophy and traditional philosophy by saying that his philosophy is an activity rather than a body of doctrine, and yet the “doctrine” is still inherent of course in its necessary and essential grammatical format. An interesting snippet on Wittgenstein’s effect on ordinary language and poetry as opposed to the “philosophical idea” and the “philosophical remark” can be found in Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder on Stanley Cavell’s This New but Unapproachable America:
[…] among Anglo-American philosophers, Cavell is surely the central disseminator of the notion that, in the case of Wittgenstein, the "philosophical" and the "literary" are inseparable. In This New but Unapproachable America (1987), for example, Cavell writes movingly of Wittgenstein's anti-totalizing stance, his "leaving the world as it is," which he relates to Heidegger's Gelassenheit. For Wittgenstein, he argues, the most "simple" thing - like "putting a practice into practice," as Bourdieu puts it - is understood to be the most ineffable. “The Investigations”, writes Cavell, “exhibits, as purely as any work of philosophy I know, philosophizing as a spiritual struggle, specifically a struggle with the contrary depths of oneself, which in the modern world will present themselves in touches of madness” (SCUA 37). Cavell is referring to the struggle between competing emphases in the consideration of human discourse – “an emphasis on its distrust of language or an emphasis on its trust of ordinary human speech” (SCUA 32). Both emphases are quite proper and therein madness lies for which is it to be? Ordinary language procedures, Cavell notes, “inherently partake of the uncanny” (SCUA 47), for example:
“Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot”? (PI #297)
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/mccaf.html)
Perloff adding that: “Here logic is indeed both foolproof and perhaps therefore slightly mad”. Language obviously “owns” us as much as we “own” our language-use, and we see this in constant play when we play in ordering our thought between “fiction” and “fact” or the “real” and “unreal”, as Wittgenstein in Zettel shows if we activate the perspective of a solipsist:
Imagine that a child was quite specially clever, so clever that he could at once be taught the doubtfulness of the existence of all things. So he learns from the beginning: "That is probably a chair."
And now how does he learn the question: "Is it also really a chair?" (Zettel #411)
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/mccaf.html)
Perloff, on considering this, states that Wittgenstein’s thought is merely a form of “riddling”:
Such riddling is what Guy Davenport seems to have in mind when he links the author of the Tractatus to Kafka. This Wittgenstein is an obsessively playful grammarian, whose riddling, disconnected sentence sequences bring to mind those of a fellow avant-gardist Wittgenstein never read, never met (and would probably have thoroughly disliked if he had met!) - namely Gertrude Stein.
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/mccaf.html)
Indeed, why not Stein who, as Perloff Notes was writing “riddles” that at closer inspection are not “riddles” at all, well before Wittgenstein began his Philosophical Investigations. But yet we feel captivated by the stony phrase of Cavell:
The Investigations […] exhibits, as purely as any work of philosophy I know, philosophizing as a spiritual struggle, specifically a struggle with the contrary depths of oneself, which in the modern world will present themselves in touches of madness.
Non-aesthetic, or not intentionally aesthetic, Wittgenstein and likewise therefore Cavell it seems to me, capture the ethic of Joyce and Duchamp as opposed to, say, Stein, in the phrase […] “a struggle with the contrary depths of oneself” in which a chord is amply struck where a case must be made for what Perloff and Cavell between them call a writing “madness”: and here it is evident too that the work of Badiou in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, for instance, is doomed because it separates the images of art from language, and also doomed differently to Derrida’s The Truth in Painting in its puerile solicitations of “Truth”, “Painting” and “Idiom” neglecting the linguistic/language phenomenon of aesthetic freedoms realizable by consistent studies of works literary, philosophical, and art historical. What one hopes instead to provide is an unhurried visual and textual unfolding of concealed immanency that deeper readings of Ulysses/Finnegans Wake and the oeuvre of Duchamp and all that surround them, can achieve.
Joyceans at Symposiums and Conferences largely enjoy an enthusiastic sense of humour and the show of these ten works Reading Joyce Reading Duchamp seemed to raise good humours in the new converted “gallery” room (or was it the wine? There is no way of telling), but in either case an opportunity for me to speak to individuals there became possible and the questions, comments and reactions I received were compelling and strong at the opening and also throughout the Symposium’s week. Though these images are intended for the Internet and the Site ianhays.net, having large images of them printed and posted into walls was an odd and rewarding exercise even if a haunting had opened up for me as to the “work of art” notionally: art works that occupy spaces on gallery walls and rarely receive a second glance.
As Duchamp put it: “The exchange between what one puts on view [the whole setting up to put on view (all areas)] and the glacial regard of the public (which sees and forgets immediately) Very often this exchange has the value of an infra thin separation (meaning that the more a thing is admired and looked at the less there is an inf. t. / sep.)”.
Duchamp’s Glass project was of course set in such a way in collusion with his own status and personality and also the remainder of his oeuvre, particularly his writings and Notes, that his deliberate approval of the literary over painting should always be a consciously maintained state of knowledge in the public artistic domain. But one wonders for whom one is writing this statement since the flight of difficult art has been overturned by mediocrity in the world of the work of the imagination and would-be scholarship, as Duchamp already knew and by a vengeance of philistinism “which sees and forgets immediately”. It will be in two years time that the 100th anniversary of Duchamp’s stay in Munich saw him produce The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride, The Bride, and Nude Descending a Staircase that led to the Glass. We remind ourselves that Duchamp's first box, the Box of 1914, included the seminal note that led to one of the artist's most important works - the 3 Stoppages …Etalon (or 3 Standard Stoppages) that for all the world seems to have been inspired by Raymond Roussel’s How I wrote Certain of My Books – and Duchamp’s Note runs for his trois stoppages –étalon:
The Idea of the Fabrication
horizontal
- If a thread one-meter long falls
straight
from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane
twisting as it pleases and creates
a new image of the unit of length
- 3 examples obtained more or less
similar conditions:
considered in their relation to one another
they are an approximate reconstitution of
the unit of length
The 3 standard stoppages are
the meter diminished
Raymond Roussel. How I Wrote Certain of My Books. (1932)
p.8. 1st. Étalon (standard measurement) á platine (platinum, from which the standard meter is made); 2nd. Étalon (stallion) á platine (tongue, in slang); whence the stallion presented on the stage of the Incomparables. (Exact Change Books. 1995. p.8)
Time and dates of influence between Duchamp and Roussel are wrong here: but as Duchamp scholarship on the whole suggests this is not an extraordinary occurrence and we can find similar kinds of case in which coincidence has taken part in the look of the Duchampian world.
“[…] touches of madness”? Certainly the Surrealists - speaking of him as he did of himself as a “genius” - took up Roussel as a highly eccentric wealthy man with peculiar habits and a unique formal style of writing making unpredictable details in his accounts, for example, in his Impressions d'Afrique through its construction (being based on homonymic puns), and it was only in the 1950's that he began to be acknowledged as one of the originators of the nouveau roman and the ‘theatre of the absurd’, with both Eugène Ionesco and Alain Robbe-Grillet citing his influence, as Duchamp had done several decades before them.
Impressions d'Afrique (1910)
The title recalls nineteenth-century travel writing, but with a sly twist. Roussel rarely left his Paris hotel, let alone France, thus his ‘impressions’ are not based around his own exploits, or indeed on reality. They are instead ideas lifted from his imagination, resulting in an inventive, often absurd and highly surreal portrait of ‘Africa’, the unique product of Roussel’s mind. The imagery he conjures is very detailed, which only serves to heighten their oddity. However, Roussel’s writing is precise and structured, describing objects and situations with a mathematical precision – in fact, scientific and musical terminology and concepts are frequently used, grounding the fanciful and making the logical appear magical. His keen fascination with theatre and music (he adapted his own works into plays and was himself a pianist) is also reproduced in tableaux; film stills, plays and ritualized ceremonies. Science, technology, music and theatre elaborately blended together, as seen when an advanced mechanical loom weaves a tableau onto a cloth in what is in essence a technological ‘performance’. The overall effect is of a dazzling surrealist theatrical performance, followed by the curtain being lifted to reveal the truth behind the magic tricks – but in a way that does not lessen the reader’s original reaction. Many of his descriptions, which are deliberately surreal, provide an amusing contrast with historical narratives on Africa – from Herodotus’s giant dung beetles to more recent accounts. A scene proceeds as we would expect it for a moment, but is then followed by an amusing detail: the image of the African king being led to the place of his coronation, which would ordinarily be solemn and ceremonial, is made ridiculous and theatrical by his costume – a low-cut evening dress and flaxen wig. Once these details are finally explained (Talu, unaware that he is in ladies’ dress, is merely imitating Carmichael’s act, which he admires), we are presented with an unusual situation: the fantastic events that we saw were not entirely the work of the natives, but the westerners. The typical stance of a narrative on foreign culture, emphasizing distance and peculiarity, has been reversed. Impressions of Africa is therefore not only a reflection of the theatrical and musical arts that Roussel loved, but a work that can be subversive. It is a highly imaginative and ultimately bizarre novel that effectively conveys the author’s unique writing style and eccentric personality. (http://www.bloggerel.com/2009/09/raymond-roussel-impressions-of-africa.html)
I have referred to Roussel here because the Joyce world as I understand it pays no respect to the linguistic sphere of influence for the period at which Duchamp was working at his most intense.
References to Roussel are to be discovered on each of the eight first Shem Pages (FW.169-176) that now belong to Charles University, Prague: Philosophy Faculty, and that will be ascribed their place on the ianhays.net internet site.
Working on the well-grounded assumption that all of Duchamp has by now in 2010 been more or less doubly-doubled by means of attraction to his plastic objects as opposed to his writings, that is to say ironized beyond further reduplication by replication in effect; his writings still now offer a “madness” that happens to be a precursor of much later writings up to this moment and no doubt way beyond. Meeting scholars briefly at Joyce Symposia and Conferences such as the Prague venue this year and this month makes for mouth-watering and back-bone stiffening help for one who is working in both Image and Text. The round table that took place on the 15th June discussing Donald Theall’s James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics consisting of Louis Armand, David Vichnar, Thomas Jackson Rice and myself, however, turned out to be a curious affair (why did I think it might not be!) but with Armand sighting first of all the importance of Theall’s work on Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in regard to technology, Vichnar expressing the power of its unique radical modernist revision of Menippean satire whose constitutive features are:
[Joyce’s] carnivalesque, allegorical satire, a metamorphosis of Menippean satire, consciously utilizes the “machinic” nature of laughter to mould a satiric machine and to investigate what Joyce found to be the inadequacies of the episteme admired by […] l’art-pour-l’art movements in comprehending the centrality […] of the newly emerging techno-culture.
My own “prelude” was delivered (as above) and Tomas Jackson Rice somehow altered the ongoing topic to science as opposed to technology that caused a hiatus on the table and also for the audience (maybe!) Is it me though, or are Joyceans or people who read a lot on and by him who attend such Symposia unaware of the tensions that exist in Joyce’s texts between the world as it was and is and how it has been affected by technology and of course science? The point of Theall’s works that progresses McLuhan’s concepts - in particular Finnegans Wake – seem to be known by only a handful of Joyceans or perhaps I am being extreme here? So few people caught by Joyce are attracted by the importance of technology in his texts that it seems worthwhile including quotations from the work of Laurent Milesi on Joyce HyperWake 3D:
Joyce’s engineering metaphors (to describe his painstaking Work in Progress) whose early stages arguably gave its writer more problems as there was no overarching scaffolding a la Ulysses, are the self-conscious traces of how the emerging new idiom was instrumental in shaping a “voluminous” construction, and materialised, in the “final” text, as the work’s self referential awareness as, for instance, a well known “vicociclometer” (FW.614.27) featuring a “harmonic condenser enginium” (FW. 310.01).
The overwhelming presence of science and technology alongside the wealth of expected literary or more generally cultural references implicitly records how the Wake’s linguistic medium is, by implications of the inner mechanics of its semantic construction, a cross between a “scientific” combinatory dynamics and a po(i)etic shaping imagination. Indeed some of the “key moments” that punctuate the endlessly returning cycles of Finnegans Wake derive their thematic consistency from science or newly invented technologies: The Euclidean (re) construction of a female triangle in the geometry lesson of FW II.2 (which reveals ALP’s 3D-forms of sorts), the splitting of the atom on FW. 353, at the end of the Butt and Taff skit, which several critics have considered to the earliest representation of a TV show in literature, before the popularisation of the invention. In that respect the holograph notebook VI.B.46.204ff. features an index on “Television”, mainly used for FW. 349, which mentions John Logie Baird, inventor of the TV principle in 1925. Mixing old and new in the gyres of Vichian history, Joyce’s Wake takes us back to the ancient etymological link between ars (art) and technology (techne), and it is therefore quite fitting to conceive of its scriptural activity as a “techno-poetic”. The Wake’s “verbivocovisual” (FW.341.18) universe can even be seen as the radical extrapolation and “condensation” of Pound’s own trinity of poetic principles: logopoeia, melopoeia and phanopoeia […].
This text by Milesi (and others that may be quoted from his essay HyperWake 3D) are so akin to texts on Duchamp, and in particular Linda Henderson’s Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works that it’s barely conceivable that these two artists have been served separately for so long a time. Milesi continues:
As Donald Theall notes in The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake, the tele-prefix appears in numerous Wakean coinages: “teleframe”, telekinesis”, telemac”, “telepath”, “telephone”, “telephony”, telescope”, telesmell”, “telesphorously”, “televisible”, “television”, “televox”, “telewisher”, thus featuring most senses of in the Wake’s visionary representation of our newly digitized experience of the real. One of the well-known thematic oppositions between Shem and Shaun, or the aural and the visual respectively, is even recast in those “remote” (tele-: distant, away, remote) terms on FW. 52.18: “television kills telephony in brother’s broil”, and FW. 338. 09-10 features a telescope-cum-television (“Tell ever so often?”) which is “distantly” echoed and distorted on FW.338.14 (“Till even so aften?), as if the linguistic medium of description was attuned to the physical principle it is conveying. Joyce’s words are remote or tele-particles travelling like waves or sounds in a distorting “bush (or bouche) telephone” […] (Laurent Milesi. HyperWake 3D. Joycemedia. 2004. Ed Louis Armand pp. 66-72)
In what we might think of now as HyperModernism in 1922 when Andre Breton wrote a glowing tribute to Duchamp as “the spearhead of all modern movements” in Littérature – a literary magazine that he had begun with Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon – our thoughts inevitably also link Joyce’s publication of Ulysses and his starting “work in progress”, Finnegans Wake, in the same year: Breton had not seen the Glass but had studies the Notes.
The Large Glass was exhibited in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum before it was accidentally broken and carefully repaired by Duchamp. Throughout it’s creation the Notes Duchamp had written and collected of course became the Green Box Notes or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even but these were not published until 1934. Or more accurately his alter ego Rrose Sélavy published in green felt covered boxes ninety-four loose Notes relating to the development and function of his magnum opus The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, known familiarly as The Large Glass. As well as being perceived as a kind of literary publication, the Green Box, as it has become known, can be – but seldom is – classified as a work of art in fine print. When viewed in this context, however, it is evident that the work bears many of the common hallmarks of a twentieth-century artist’s print publication. It was produced in a printing medium carefully chosen by the artist to best convey the conceptual aims of the work. The quality of the paper stocks and inks were integral to the success of the work, and although not actually printed by the artist himself, Duchamp closely supervised all aspects of production. The main element, however, that set the work apart from other fine art print works of the time was its use of photomechanical, instead of the traditionally sanctioned autographic, printing methods. Here, as with many other aspects of his practice, Duchamp was a pioneer: the use of photomechanical print as a creative medium did not significantly enter the realm of fine-art printmaking until the late-1950s and early 1960s.
It may be “madness” to suggest that not only Duchamp’s Notes but also Joyce’s Notes to the Wake lie in the “margins” of both Art and Writing using a grammar of short-circuitry, even as neither the Glass nor Finnegans Wake themselves have, in the most ordinary sense, entered into what we could call a Mainstream Modernist Centre, and never will. The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo appeal as Duchamp’s Notes do, to the idea of translation that suggests movement: the movement from the “thought-marks” on a page as a constituent and ingredient for a new assemblage, yet they similarly remain works of some aesthetic poetic-artistic appeal for the reflective intellect as individual pages, and also in terms of Genetic Criticism. The Notes of Duchamp are, for the most part undated. This corpus of his work combines half French and half American papers, kept in major museums and collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Here the question of dating each fragment from a Genetic Critical perspective is crucial, and since Duchamp kept coming back to some specific projects on several occasions after as much as ten or twenty years Genetic Criticism’s work appears more crucial than ever.
The Large Glass consists of two distinct realms of course, the realm of the Bride above, and the realm of the Bachelors below, both desiring and imagining one another without any possibility of mutual comprehension. One is here reminded of the real / imaginary distinction in discussions of Cyber and Hyperspace and what has become infinitely more than mere auxiliary “writing” in both Duchamp and Joyce’s art. “Seeing” Duchamp as the artist who is said to have attempted to duplicate exactly the “original” works he had “made” for his Boite en valise including the papers on which his Notes were written et al (!) but on a much smaller scale (We must be careful in discussing Duchamp as to terms like “original” and “made” [as in “made by the artist himself”] because of his readymades, his employment of commercial artists for certain details to his art including portions of the Glass project, Etant Donnes; Tu’m, Readymade Malheureux, and of course the Boite en valise itself and more). The Tate in London is more than relaxed concerning the Critical Genetic mentality of scholarship in the work of Duchamp than is useful in this context since, for instance, we find the following on their Internet Site concerning “Duchamp’s creation” of his Boite en valise:
It appears that Duchamp employed a particularly Parisian approach to the process of producing the boxes’ coloured prints. Instead of using a photographic colour separation technique (as was common in Germany at the time), the pochoir stencil colouring process was used. This involved printing a key collotype image in black ink and overlaying specially cut copper stencils which were used as a guide for the application of hand-rendered watercolour washes. Although this sounds relatively primitive, the detail of the continuous-tone collotype image combined with – in many cases a multitude of subtly layered colour washes – produced an image remarkably similar to the original. This was especially true for works on paper. Collotype was also flexible enough to print onto a variety of paper stocks and Duchamp capitalised on this by ‘scouring Paris’ in his words looking for paper to match as closely as possible his original Notes. Not only did he match the paper [!] but he also created a series of templates allowing the prints to be torn around their edges to replicate the shape of the scraps of paper on which the Notes were originally written.
It is difficult to know if the Tate has failed to see the joke Duchamp made of “scouring Paris” for the “right kinds of paper to match as closely as possible his original Notes”, but he wrote:
I wanted to reproduce them as accurately as possible. So I had all of these thoughts lithographed in the same ink which had been used for the originals. To find paper that was exactly the same, I had to ransack the most unlikely nooks and crannies of Paris. Then we cut out three hundred copies of each lithograph with the help of zinc patterns that I had cut out on the outlines of the original papers.
(http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/News/GreenBoxNote.html)
The “differAnce” that exists between Bride and Bachelors exists too in Duchamp’s life, and what he said or wrote was the case (and what actually was the case) will more often than not be different things: for we must not do him the injustice of “seeing” in him an “authentic” artist so much as an “authoritative” sham and an artist seeking his own written language that would develop synaesthetically with the plastic objects he “put on view”. Short of suggesting that the Shem figure in Joyce’s Wake has some genuine features that correspond to Duchamp it is of interest to us to contemplate, as it were, a HyperModernism around 1922 and think through what has occurred in the visual arts since then in mainstream galleries and museums of art, institutions of art and design and the New Universities, all of which in the UK and the USA at least have been consistently failing to link Duchamp and therefore visual art as such more with literature, philosophy and the History of Ideas. Finnegans Wake, when it was first published was spuriously named a “fake”, “dupe” and “joke” like Duchamp’s Glass project - largely because aficionados were still getting to grips (or getting over) Cubism and Ulysses and were afraid of their own inadequacies faced with works that were both enveloping some aspects of these former intellectual hurdles and simultaneously waving goodbye to them and to Modernist Autonomy of the work of art as the product of “genius” in the shape of Picasso, and the form of the likes of Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and yes, Gertrude Stein. There are many writers today, and art organizations, who either have forgotten or simply do no know with what research and acuity Duchamp gave art a new raison d’etre - as a means of dealing with feelings, sensations, ambiances, vibrations in the mind intended to move visual art closer and become more identifiable with actual Poesis. Casual texts of an impoverished type face us on the internet for instance, that blunt the academic work Duchamp undertook, and where we are given good instances of bad thinking concerning his oeuvre even from elevated Duchamp Studies like tout-fait. As J. Kennedy writes in his opening paragraph, for instance, in an essay that is otherwise of interest to Duchampians:
If the aura of the "original" in the work of art has been effectively dismissed by the techniques of modern mechanical reproduction, then we might say that that other aura (the aura of the fake, the inauthentic, the spurious) has been more effectively installed. The aura of the dupe, the stand-in, the hoax can be seen as a particularly "modern" incarnation - one directly relevant to, if not entirely generated by, Duchamp and Duchamp studies. So much of Duchamp criticism, before it can make even a single claim or observation, must contend with the possibility that it is itself being "taken," shown for a "Duchump" - Duchamp as the proto-typical postmodern trickster, but also as the academic grifter par excellence.
(http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Notes/kennedy/kennedy.html)
No supplementary criticism is required on this quotation (save that “aura” has been a ghost in the writings on art and the reception of art so much so that it now has the status of something like a well-used child’s toy). It may be that at Joyce Symposia and Conferences the sensation of fun, fraud, and deep scholarship in the form of Genetic Criticism, Radical Nonsense; Joyce and Memory; Inchoative Joyce; Joyce’s Classical References and Mythical Tropes; The Possible Worlds of Joycean Genetics; Joyce, Darwin and Evolution; Joyce and Kafka and so and on, will in the future be debated as part of a 1922 radical renaissance in art and literature (which as Duchamp suggested it would) “went underground” never to return in the visual arts in a form consistent with its “original” scholarship and sophistication: it’s hilarity at being, in a word, “serious”. Of course Duchamp was at one and the same time seducing the viewer by offering complexity between language and object through satire, irony and verbal witticisms rather than relying on technical or aesthetic appeal? What other brands of Duchampian satire?
Well Duchamp refers to Jarry's ideas and consciously spoke about his desire to re-invent the physical model of the time when he described his Standard Stoppages (Etalon) as "casting a pataphysical doubt on the concept of the straight line as being the shortest route from one point to another". He states in his Notes that he is interested in describing "a reality which would be possible by slightly distending the laws of physics and chemistry," and the original Stoppages represent a fundamental unit of that distension. Rather like Planck's (“Splanck[s] in FW. 505.28) constant in quantum mechanics, or the speed of light in General Relativity, the Stoppages represent a new basic metric for describing and measuring the profoundly irrational space that is described in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. This relationship is evident in the placement of a Network of Stoppages in The Large Glass, a pataphysical device that carries the spray of the Bachelor Machine to the sieves and parasols. He places the new metric directly into the system, using his measuring device to transport the erotic energy of the Bachelors through laughter, the delicate poetic, and language.
Duchamp had always maintained that his Glass was not just something to be looked at but "an accumulation of ideas," in which verbal elements were at least as important as visual ones, perhaps even more so. [...] As Duchamp would say in a 1959 interview, he had "tried in that big Glass to find a completely personal and new means of expression; the final product was to be a wedding of mental and visual reactions; in other words, the ideas in the Glass were more important than the actual visual realization." Since the ideas were contained (more or less) in the Notes, their long-delayed publication would become a new chapter in the continuing saga of his unfinished, shattered, but far from defunct masterpiece.
Calvin Tomkins. Duchamp. (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), p. 296.
In 1954, Michel Carrouges found a structural similarity between Duchamp's Large Glass and the punitive apparatus described in Franz Kafka's short story In the Penal Colony. The apparatus consists of a lower part: the "Bed", an upper part: the "Designer", and a part that moves up and down and is called the "Harrow". The condemned man is strapped to the bed and whatever commandment the prisoner has broken is written on his body by the Harrow, which consists of an unspecified number of needles fixed in Glass. The prisoner is not told of his sentence. He learns it on his body. This generally takes about six hours of suffering, after which the prisoner, in a moment of transfiguration, reads the inscription through his wounds, and dies in the hours that follow. In Kafka's story, the officer in charge of the punishment, seeing that the system of the colony is breaking down, places himself in the machine and dies as the machine self-destructs. In his Les Machines célibataires for Michel Carrouges, the similarities between these two machines resides first in the fact that they both operate as closed circuits and second as the action of one zone upon another. In both of these machines a message from the upper zone is inscribed upon the lower one. The fact that one is about sex while the other is about death underscores the importance of the modern myth of the bachelor machine, a sort of new technological version of the mirror of narcissus, in which is played out the interferences of mechanism, of terror, of eroticism, and of religion or anti-religion. The myth of the bachelor machine is a kind of double articulation of difference: sexual difference and machinic difference. Joyce’s Shem figure who inscribes his flesh as on Vellum is tattooing his world of “sin skin” prepared for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, codices and books. The ten works on show at the Joyce Symposium are forages into this arena of linguistic carnage at the point of the Photoshop Printer’s Pen - the first prints that have been exhibited in this form under Reading Joyce Reading Duchamp. It is extremely difficult for me to make a statement concerning their initial reception because there were (and are) many questions that the spectators would have needed to ask themselves about the image and texts that are the initial images for the Shem section of Finnegans Wake, and a person or persons unfamiliar with Duchamp would not make the associations and allusions in these works that a Duchampian might do and vice versa: the sticky point as to their “merit” falls between what a spectator may know of both of these hyper-renaissance men of immense credibility, stature and intellect – and what each such spectator brings with them to the works in question. Nobody is looking for answers, however, not from me and apparently not from a response that would come from me concerning tiny details of these works on ianhays.net.